I have found this article’s quality to be extremely low. The “fix” mentioned in the title is proof-of-work, with an explanation that spans one full sentence. According to the author, the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining is estimated to be 27.03 TWh. To compare, we have a very scientific “that’s still peanuts compared to the energy use of the internet”. Recall that the bitcoin network processes approximately 3 transactions per second when running in full gear.

I dug up this report [0], which seems to be one of the most recent estimates of datacenter energy usage (US only unfortunately). The estimated energy usage for datacenters in the US is 70 TWh in 2014, and estimated to be 73 TWh in 2020.

So bitcoin uses approximately ⅓ of the energy the Internet uses in the US. That is far from “peanuts”.

0: https://eta.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/publications/lbnl-100577...